But I knew what I'd smelled and I asked his campaign to double-check and to ask him if he'd had a cigarette.

They reported back that he had told them he hadn't had a cigarette since he quit.

And maybe that was true. Maybe I imagined the cigarette smoke. My olfactory nerve somehow misfired.

Except….last night on MSNBC's Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful.

“I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on," he said. "But it is a struggle like everything else.”

Now I wonder about last August.

Tapper is rightly concerned that Obama failed to deal with this honestly:

Except that I don't like feeling that I wasn't being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we're confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)

Tapper's point is well taken, but Obama's continuing prevarication about what Senator McCain actually said about a long-term US presence in Iraq is a more serious concern because Obama continues to falsely mischaracterize McCain's remarks even though a number of nonpartisan entities have found that Obama is grossly misrepresenting what Senator McCain actually said.

One can only conclude that because of Obama's refusal to stop the distortion, Obama's "new kind of politics" amounts to nothing more than "distortion to the point of rank falsehood" and "seriously misleading voter -- if not outright lying to them." He promised better.